renkon shoga gohan

I was watching a show the other week and they were talking about foods that help bring your immunity up.

The show also talked about different prefectures in Japan and what they eat for longevity.

One food item that caught my eye was renkon (lotus root) shoga (ginger) gohan (rice).

In Kumamoto prefecture, they eat a lot of renkon (lotus root) and one way they like to eat it is with rice.

There wasn't a recipe given so I pieced together different recipes to come up with this...

Renkon Shoga Kamameshi : serves 4
2 cups rice, washed
45 grams shoga (ginger) thinly sliced
400 mililiters dashi (stock) (2 cups)*
40 mililiters (8 teaspoons) shoyu (soy sauce)
20 mililiters (4 teaspoons) mirin (sweet rice wine)
20 mililiters (4 teaspoons) sake (rice wine)

*To make dashi
450 mililiters water
4 grams dashi konbu (seaweed for dashi)
4 grams katsuo-bushi (dried bonito)
Put the konbu into the water and just before coming to a boil, remove the konbu.
Add the katsuo-bushi and turn off the heat.
Strain the dashi in a cheesecloth or paper towel.

For the renkon:
50 grams renkon (lotus root), washed well and chopped into small pieces
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons sake (rice wine)
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons shoyu (soy sauce)
1 tablespoon mirin (sweet rice wine)

After washing the rice, add the ginger, dashi, shoyu, mirin and sake and cook in your rice cooker
In a frying pan, heat the oil and toss the renkon to coat
After the renkon is coated with the oil add the sugar, sake, shoyu & mirin
When most of the liquid has evaporated add renkon to the cooked rice

NOTES: You might be wondering why the renkon isn't added to the rice to be cooked together? Apparently it will lose its "crunch" if you cook it in the rice cooker. Another point that the show made was that renkon shouldn't be peeled, just use it as is, lots of vitamins in the "skin", so scrub it well as it grows in the mud.
My ginger was really mature so there was lot of "strings", if you do use mature ginger, cut up finely instead of just thinly slicing.
Also, I would use sesame oil instead of olive oil, to give the renkon and rice a little more flavor.
Overall though, this took some time to make but I liked this and will definitely make this again.

p.s. Last night we had a lightning "show". The rain was hitting our glass door on the lanai, knocked over several plants and gave everything a good drenching. These sudden showers are one thing but the amount of rain they bring are krazy! Stay safe & dry everyone!

shogayu + winner

First off, I want to thank all of you that entered my giveaway, the lucky winner picked by the random number generator was Lynne! Please email me your snail mail address at kat (dot)nsatoshi (at) gmail (dot) com, so I can send out your box of "stuff".

Now, onto my post...depending on where you are in the world, you may have the need to warm up.

In Japan, there are packages of instant shogayu, but there is a pretty easy way to do it yourself.

First of all, what is shogayu? Literally it is ginger hot water. The packaged instant version has kudzu (arrowroot) in it to make it thick, and sugar but if you don't have kudzu you can make it with just 3 ingredients: water, ginger & your favorite sweetner.

I grated a nub of ginger using a fourth for a different recipe and the rest for the shogayu. (If you want it more "gingery", then grate more.)

In a pot, I put 3 cups of water and the grated ginger. When the water came to a boil, I stirred in a bit of honey. (You could make this really sweet or not, it is up to you.)

After the honey melts, strain the mixture into a cup (unless you want to drink the grated ginger). Drinking this mixture should definitely warm you up, naturally.

Stay warm everyone!

p.s. I think this drink would also be quite nice chilled too, but I'll try that in a couple of months.

p.p.s. the winner of this giveaway no longer has a public blog